US President Barack Obama answered questions from YouTube users Monday in the latest embrace of cyberspace by a White House that has also launched Facebook and MySpace pages and Twitter and Flickr feeds.

The 40-minute event with the president, who relied heavily on the Internet during his election campaign, was live-streamed on the video-sharing site and the official White House website.

Thousands of YouTube users submitted more than 11,000 questions on a wide range of issues including jobs, the economy, health care, foreign policy, energy, the environment, education and financial and government reform.

YouTube users then voted for their favorite questions and some of the top vote-getting video questions were shown to Obama by Steve Grove, the head of news and politics at Google-owned YouTube.

One of the most popular questions concerned legalization of marijuana as lobbying groups -- as they have done with previous open Internet forums -- mobilized their supporters to flood YouTube with submissions.

Obama was asked his view on legalization of marijuana at a similar forum last year involving questions submitted by the public online, but the question was not among those asked on Monday.Obama, at the end of the YouTube interview, said he hopes to be able to repeat the experience "on a more regular basis, because it gives me great access to all the people out there with wonderful ideas."

Obama used the Internet during his presidential campaign for organizing, fundraising and communicating and the White House has a channel on YouTube in addition to its presence on Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and Twitter.

Last month the White House unveiled a free application for the Apple iPhone which features live video streaming of presidential events.

Announcing the YouTube interview, White House "New Media" director Macon Phillips said it was a bid to "offer the public a direct and participatory way to communicate back to (the president)."

Nancy Scola of TechPresident.com, a blog about politics and technology, expressed some disappointment with the YouTube interview, but agreed that "there's value in having citizens get a chance to question the president, no matter what the questions."

"While the project was intriguing, innovative, and exciting in concept, in execution it turned out that very few of the questions-via-YouTube got at topics that Obama hasn't addressed, repeatedly, in some other venue," she said.

"We can hope that, given an openness to trying these new ways to engage on the part of the White House, we, as citizen-questioners, can only get better at the job, and the tools can only evolve to pick out questions that elicit something newer, something deeper, more compelling," Scola said.